Smartphone upstart Jolla - founded by a bunch of ex-Nokia engineers - has finally unveiled a device. The gadget's technical details are few and far between at this moment.
The handset itself won't be available until the end of the year, but anyone willing to plonk down €100 can get get in line early for the €399 phone and bag a …

Re: Mmm...

Re: Mmm...

don't get fooled by numbers games, My PC has stacks and stacks and runs like a dog because it has a load of MS crap plastered all over it. My older machine has less crap but also less memory and does far more far quicker.

16gb is more than enough... my first 'real' machine had 512K - yes K, and the biggest hard drive you could buy at any affordable price - 32M - yes M (most folk had a 20mb)

I have placed my order and look forward to the arrival, I am also looking at the case and wondering whether there is money to be made in making a case with a chip and some good apps and things... remember the old clip on cases Nokias had - how well they sold on every street market... now imagine that but BETTER :) :)

Hmmm, are you sure? It depends on how big they are and how much they've sunk into the hardware side of things. Mind you, the phone hardware world is coalescing on them all being pretty much the same, so building any decent quality hardware is probably more of a marketing choice rather than an engineering challenge.

If they're small (=cheap), enthusiastic and talented and get the balance of the software just right so as to appeal to the talented enthusiast pro or amateur they could (in their terms) do very nicely indeed. You don't have to become Apple big if your investors aren't expecting or demanding that. The problem with being Apple-sized is that its way too easy to shrink by frightening amounts, just like is happening to Apple now.

And your reason for that?

I love peoples off the cuff comments which are not backed up by any argument - lucid or otherwise. Why is it dead? It has a very interesting fun feature which is unique, it works with the apps which most people now want, it looks good, the price is fine... now, just what was it we were supposed to laugh at as we zipped off to buy yet another Samsung imitation iPhone?

Re: maybe not DOA, but certainly insignificant...

Well maybe - maybe not. I've not actually played with one but looking at the video it looks to me to be the first phone to actually move the state of phone os development ahead of iOS. When the iphone came out it was way ahead of existing phones, then Android / Blackberry 10 / Phone 8 were kind of catch up efforts to try to keep up with Apple. As an iphone user this is the first thing I've seen that looks a clear step forward from current Apple tech.

Microsoft isn't worried...

I predict a little conversation along the lines of "That's a nice little smartphone company you've got there, it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it..." soon after the first model starts to ship.

Re: Ota tuo, vihreä robotti Google!

Fascinating to find something written in finnish here. But, I have to slightly correct both the headline and the translation. It should be, in my opinion, "Ota turpaas, sä vihree Google-robotti" (that was approximately how it should be said in my local dialect) / "Take that, [you] green Google robot!". [you] is strongly implied in my native language, and quite often also written or said too. Although, it is also very often replaced with a four-letter or seven-letter word beginning with f.

Re: Ota tuo, vihreä robotti Google!

Like with "take that", "täältä pesee" is more general threat not stating outright that there will be a serving of knuckle sandwiches and a boast of ones manpower, a claim that whatever is coming, there will be plenty more to follow.

And for googlen vihreä robotti, im guessing the original was green robot of Google. There is no typo there, it is googlen, not Googlen. When stating ownership the name is written with g, not G.

As for actual phone, I can't wait to have one as for phones, that is closest one can get to nerdgasm these days. Rare with one of a kind feature, built from ground up to take maximum out of hardware.

Re: Ota tuo, vihreä robotti Google!

Re: Microsoft isn't worried...

Except that Jolla has been in discussions with Nokia since the early stages.

Also, shortly before Jolla appeared, Elop said there was no plan B but the chairman of the board said there was a plan B. So the board knows more then Elop and the chairman will not elaborate on what plan B.

Re: Microsoft isn't worried...

Re: Ota tuo, vihreä robotti Google!

It is a risk, if the product is a success and it is a largely private concern it may well be that Nokia can't buy it. I certainly wouldn't sell a successful phone manufacturing company to them... I might well wait a few years and buy Nokia just for the pleasure of sacking Elop and the board that supports him.

Re: Would be hilarious if Jolla becomes bigger than Nokia in a few years

What, 5million a quarter, the burning platform was managing 30million a quarter in a smaller market

Nokia aren't totally dead yet but they are so far back in the race that it seems unlikely that they will again rise beyond tail end charlies. Don't forget that many of their 'smart phone' sales aren't actually smartphones - they reclassified some oft he old s40 phones (which definitely aren't windows phone, aren't smart etc etc) as 'smart phones' so their sales figures wouldn't look the disaster they are!

Re: unlikely that Nokia would invest in another flavour

Re: Would be hilarious if Jolla becomes bigger than Nokia in a few years

Define rapidly. You also cannot use the growth percentage to make a point. Example, I sell one unit. When I sell a second unit I had a 100% increase in sales. So, if I sold one unit in 2012 and 10 in 2013, I saw 1,000% increase in sales. Selling 10 handsets though is an utter failure though.

"The cyan clip-on bit is the "other half" of the handset: a swappable section with its own memory storage and it can change the interface or add content to the phone - a bit like a removable SD card only bigger, brighter and more proprietary."

Ah, good old days! I use to work for a mobile company back in 2003 where we were working on similar idea. The company had called the technology "smart skin": http://www.wildseed.com and http://www.wildseed.com/bananna2.jpg :)

a bit like a removable SD card only bigger, brighter and more proprietary

I wish them well

They might be small, and they definitely have one hell of a mountain to climb, but we need another phone OS (or 2) that doesn't lock you into the manufacturers garden. Plus I have a soft spot for Maemo, as it was then, from my N900 owning days.

Only thing is, in one of the shots I've seen elsewhere there was a hint of a fairly tile-esque UI. I'm hoping that's not going to be the case, I really don't like the whole tile metaphor in the world of MS and I'd be disappointed to see it appear here.

Re: I wish them well

Bought a 9320 after my N900 started to go. Had assumed that my next phone would be a Z10 or a Q10. That might not be the case now. Not willing (or able) to pay a vapourware deposit now but my interest has been piqued.

Re: Good Luck!

N9 Meego....

I have an N9 and am very, very happy with it. The only thing I want it to do that I'm not able to is Viber or Whatsapp. And that is only because the 'phone came before the software. Not the phones fault really. Everything else works like a dream, including Skype and GTalk.